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Category: vipassana
Our Best and Most Lasting Gift: The Universal Features of Meditation
This is a lecture by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D. delivered at the University of Colorado, Boulder
This talk was originally written in response to an invitation from multiple sponsors at Yale University. Versions of this talk were given in 2015 at Northeastern University, and in 2016 at Yale University, New York University, The University of Washington, Seattle, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and the University of Colorado, Boulder, Harvard University, and Brown University, as well as at Dhamma Patapa Vipassana Center, Georgia.
This talk was recorded at the University of Colorado, Boulder and is meant more as an introductory talk using less technical language with more explanation and requiring no previous biological knowledge.
Paul Fleischman
audio recorded at the University of Colorado, Boulder
Sept. 29, 2016, 59 minutes
PDF download of the talk and the audio talk are available here.Direct link to the talk –here.
Except from text below:
“The main insight I want to emphasize is that meditation is the systematic cultivation of homeostatic regulation of the mind, body, and emotions.”
“Another way to say all of this is that meditation is the practice of mental and emotional balancing. In silence, your thoughts and feelings rise up, demanding, threatening, or arousing you, but you then re-direct them towards calm and self-possession, practicing the restorative of equanimity.
You exercise and expand your executive function, your ability to modulate
your psyche. You practice self-observation, self-control and self-mastery.
In your mind, various unmet cravings, upsets, losses and grief have caused you suffering, and meditation gives you a way to stop cycling around and around them helplessly. It provides some tools for self-collection.”“The mind has a substantial but nevertheless limited impact on the body. There are times when you have to fix the body by fixing the body. The reason I am stressing this is because we want to have a meditation that is realistic and honest rather than an inflated over belief.”
“Meditation is always easy and always hard.
It is easy because it is superimposed upon the natural restorative mental and physical functions that make life possible, the maintenance of relative stability.
But it is hard because even the body has to work to find the middle path. All of our coats and heated homes in winter, and all of our AC cars and swimming pools of summer, are creations to help our homeostatic temperature regulators. As we live and age, our self regulation, which is subject to continuous challenge, always fails. We die. So meditation is the effort of consciousness to remain calm, balanced, homeostatic, as all the other homeostatic regulators fail. Meditation is also always a challenge because our minds are not only based on a natural function but also upon a doomed person. We can say that all information systems decay; the signals become lost to noise. We can define death as the loss of vital homeostatic regulation. When we meditate we bask in the warmth of natureʼs core homeostatic basin, and we exert the will of concentration and consciousness to persevere in natureʼs peace even as it departs from our bodies like the Lone Ranger. Meditation can become an extension, stretching into new zones and dimensions, transcending the merely natural.
Meditation is always a challenge because our minds are not only drawn to homeostasis, but they are simultaneously working in the service of adaptive manipulation and acquisition of the outside world. One part of us does not want to relinquish its vigilance and stealth.”“Vipassana meditation is taught in ten day residential courses so that it starts with reasonable commitment. It is intended to shape lives through deep and meaningful psychological experiences.”
“Vipassana meditation focuses on the experience of the impermanence of the body, with all of its molecules, chemicals, sensations, and mentations. The meditationʼs first goals are acceptance of the reality of impermanence of all our sensations with equanimity and dignity, and the inspiration to pervade the world with a modicum of peace and love. Vipassana can be interpreted as a psychology of the scientific world-view, an adjustment to the galactic cosmos of shifting and unstable things that also gives birth to us.”
“As soon as a person sits down and closes his or her eyes to meditate, a particular psychological frame is activated. External stimuli are cut off. Demands and intrusions are unplugged. Whatever else the meditator does, he or she has stepped back from active coping, manipulating, and
functioning, and has risen into a realm of psychological adjustment rather
than of instrumental action. The meditator no longer rearranges the three
dimensional world, but, for a time at least, becomes committed to rearranging his or her own psyche. The center of concern becomes adjusting and accepting rather than dominating, organizing , or controlling. This is the psychological, subjective stance within homeostasis. We cope with ourselves. Our t-shirts could say “Thinking and Feeling Homeostatics.Not all psychic and social threads have been cut. In fact, the meditator joins and participates in traditions, lessons, and skill training. Although externalizing engagements have been shut down, other types of mental life
have actually been augmented”“Although most meditations define some focus for the mind, that focus will be intermittent, because no one can focus perfectly, and the meditatorʼs own thoughts and feelings, fears and wishes will rise up into consciousness
during the moments when focus wavers. The meditator will become more
self-aware. The pre-conscious mind will emerge front and center. Mental contents that were partly or even fully hidden will be revealed as if they were on a fifty-six inch high definition flat screen.
“Know thyself.” “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
You canʼt be integrated with a person you donʼt know. Meditation leads to an increased unity between the conscious and preconscious mind.”“If you are doing Vipassana meditation, the focus of your meditation is your body. Therefore you are integrating your mind and body by observing your body as the focus of your mind. The integrative process that I have described, where you come to terms with your thoughts and learn not to judge them, may also be going on with your body, with its varying sensations, pleasures and pains.”
there is more… listen to the talk…
vipassana
in the last 10-day course that I was sitting in Dhamma Dvara (31.11 – 11.12.2016) I was wondering… how is it that I didn’t speak, wrote about vipassana in the last years.
then in one of the sittings it came to me and remembered that Adi told us, in one of the courses at Dumbrava (2007 / 2008), not to talk, write about it. of course that was in good spirit, as many don’t understand the techniques… and more than that, if you ask me what it is I can say something which is through my own lenses… my own experience, perception.
then Goenka, in one the the evening discourses, explicitly said that if we find this “technique” good for us, DO tell, DO write, DO let others know about it (of course, not by teaching it)… so that many more people can know about it and go to try it, if they feel like.
I realized I wanted to write about it for so long now… for myself… and something was holding me back, subconsciously. now that holding back is not here anymore, I am at peace with writing about it – I will do it for myself, in the first place, as I feel, when I feel, if I feel.
at peace,
reverence of approach
An apprenticeship with sorrow invites us to learn the rites of grief and to practice a reverence of approach, as Irish poet/philosopher John O’Donohue suggests. He writes, “What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach… When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us.” How we approach our sorrows profoundly affects what comes to us in return. We often hold grief at a distance, hoping to avoid our entanglement with his challenging emotion. This leads to our feeling detached, disconnected and cold. At other times, there is not space between us and the grief we are feeling.We are them swept up in the tidal surge of sorrow and often feel as though we are drowning. An approach of reverence offers us the chance to learn a more skillful pattern of relating with grief. When we come to our grief with reverence, we find ourselves in right relationship with sorrow, neither too far away nor too close. We have entered into an ongoing conversation with this difficult, holy visitor. Learning we can be with grief, holding it softly and warmly, is the first task in our apprenticeship.
Approaching sorrow, however, requires enormous psychic strength. For us to tolerate the rigors of engaging the images, emotions, memories and dreams that arises in times of grief, we need to fortify our interior ground. This is done through developing a practice that we sustain over time, Any form will do – writing, drawing, meditation, prayer, dance or something else – as long as we continue to show up and maintain our effort. A practice offers ballast, something to help us hold steady in difficult times. This deepens our capacity to hold the vulnerable emotions surrounding loss without being overwhelmed by them. Grief work is not passive: it implies an ongoing practice of deepening, attending and listening. It is an act of devotion, rooted in love and compassion.
One of the most essential skills we need to develop in our apprenticeship is our ability to stay present in our adult selves when grief arises.
Krishnamacharya and all the humble spirits
last night around 4 am I woke up with Krishnamacharya in my mind and heart.
I am reading these days “Yoga and the Living Tradition of KRISHNAMACHARYA”, written by his son T.K. V. Desikachar with R.H. Craven… and feeling so grateful to further discover the humbleness of this… man.
last night I had this deep feeling of gratefulness for all the spirits that touches my life and brought me to this moment… spirits what keeps humanity living, what cares for life…
all came to me last night…
my father come to me… the first time when I met humbleness in this lifetime was in my father… he was offering so much for this world, in his context, without asking for anything in return, having this deep trust that all is good… and being good and doing good just as a way of living… i recognized this later… when he was not around in the physicality.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh come to me… he offered my a glimpse of what love and life can be… lit my life in some of the most “darkest” moments… moments that got me into the light… his humbleness offered me hope… i always knew there is something grater then me and my “issues” and he touched that in me… he was gone from this physical world when I found him… but so grateful to live some of my lifetime when he also lived (departed 1990).
Buddha, Saya Gyi U Ba Khin, S.N. Goenka (departed 2013), Adi and all the teaching assistant of vipassana that I met come to me… when I met Rodica at Dumbrava… I felt she’s humbleness embodied… one of the the most soft , loving (metta) and determined (adhitthana) women i met in this lifetime.
i remember the fourth morning of my first vipassana retreat, 24th of August, 2007, 4 am, my mind didn’t want to wake up to go to the meditation hall (“I am tired, I want to sleep”)… I knew the the hall was full, I was still in bed… judging myself heavily for that. she came to my room, put on the light and with the softest-loving and firmest voice I’ve ever heard she said “it’s time for you to come, we are waiting for you”. and she stood there, her eyes down, in noble silence, creating space for me to pass the door, holding me soft in her heart… no trace of judgment, felt her love giving me power to stand up and move…she was the one whom I feel supported by, in the moment I entered the full hall waiting for me – noticing later that was the most shameful moment of my life :).
Rodica it’s always in the background of the Dumbrava Vipassana Meditation Center… like a beckon… holding the space with her love, compassion and humbleness.
then Pantajali, Nathamuni, Krishnamachyara (departed 1989), Desikachar (departed couple pf days ago)… all this lineage what brought and continue to hold the teachings of Yoga into the world.
I woke up this morning wanting to specifically know more about Krishnamacharya… I WANT to be on the MAT, to know him (his qualities) through his teachings… and not only…
most of the times I go to the mat (or sitting) I invoke these great spirits and in closing my sittings send metta to all the people who are touching my life, opening myself to all these spirits…
I feel humble and grateful living these times… surrounded by the people I am surrounded… living along with great spirits who deeply care for this world and for the people… for keeping humanity human… for bringing back the true nature of us, for efforts that they… we 🙂 [mind: “is this humbleness?]… put in for remembering, manifesting who we are in our pure true essence… for looking at the veil of illusion, delusion… for recognizing the power that lies within…
on to the mat…
observing the breath
Even though it seams like such an easy thing, it is actually very difficult simply to follow the movement of the breath. In the moment when we concentrate on the breath it has a tendency to change; we are inclined to control the natural breathing ratio, to disturb it. When we follow the breath we tend to go in one of two directions – either we occupy ourselves with the feel of the breath or we simply observe it. If we just observe we do not need to to anything with the activity of the breath itself. It is like watching the flow of a river. When we are able to this we find ourselves almost in a state of meditation. This is the reason why we are sometimes advised simply to observe the breath: as we do this our mind quiets down. It is not easy, but it is marvelous.
T.K.V. Desikatchar – The Heart of Yoga. Developing a Personal Practice – 6 Pranayama
this is yoga…
this is vipassana…
the breath is my teacher
“The feeling of the breath” refers to the feeling of energy or prana moving in the body. The principles underlying each classic asana has a particular implication to the movement of prana in the body. A teacher who understands asana from the point of view of whole-body feeling and the movement of prana can adopt classic asanas to the needs of each student. The student thus enjoys and benefits from the principle that it inherent to each particular posture.
The key to right practice and the appropriate variations of an asana is to maintain the link between breath and body. Via the breath we can be with the whole body and observe the unfolding of an asana. Rather than struggle with the body in an asana, we monitor the asana with the number of breaths and the breath ration (inhale, pause, exhale, pause) that is appropriate for us. If our breath is smooth and has continuity, the asana will e beneficial.
The breath is one of the means by witch we vary asanas. There is a natural elasticity in the body that is enhanced as we breath in asana practice. As the body moves the breath moves, and as the breath is stationary the body is stationary. Thus the breath and body becomes one movement, one process, and that is a very powerful yoga. Maintaining this link between breath and body, particularly in lengthening the exhale and pausing after the exhale, has more significance to the purpose of yoga than achieving a classic asana for its own sake. the breath has a very important role in asana practice. We should not compromise the easy flow of the breath to achieve the asana.
The breath is one of the best means for observing yourself in your yoga practice. How does the body respond to the breath, and how does the breath respond to the movement of the body? The breath should be your teacher.
T.K.V. Desikatchar – The Heart of Yoga. Developing a Personal Practice – 5 Asana Variations
this is what yoga is about
this is what vipassana is about
despre… cum?
am primit textul de mai jos de la zana noastra Nora. l-am cautat pe net, nu am gasit, sursa, autorul, dar vreau sa il postez aici… sa ramana…
“Daca un tren nu s-a oprit in statia ta, inseamna ca acel tren nu este pentru tine. Un alt tren incearca sa ajunga la tine, dar nu poate face acest lucru, atata timp cat un tren nepotrivit este inca retinut de intensitatea dorintei tale.”
Marianne Williamson
Cat de usoara si frumoasa ar deveni viata noastra, daca am invata sa lasam sa plece ceea ce este de plecat si sa lasam sa vina ceea ce este de venit, fara a ramane atasati de ceea ce pleaca sau de ceea ce vine.
Exista o usurinta a trarii si o bucurie a inimii cand acceptam cursul vietii exact asa cum este. Invatam, in acest cadru, recunostinta profunda pentru tot si toate si descoperim in fiecare moment si in fiecare experienta, indiferent de natura sa, o ocazie sacra de a privi in interiorul nostru si de a ramane senini si linistiti, privind dincolo de aparentele lumii exterioare.Libertatea pe care o regasim atunci in interior si seninatatea care se aseaza in inimile noastre, sunt dovezi ale unei maturitati spirituale si a unui intelegeri mai profunde a vietii.
Cand acceptam ceea ce este:
1. ne pastram* capacitatea* de a ne bucura de fiecare moment al vietii, fara a ramane* atasati* de credinta despre cum ar trebui un lucru sa fie. Atasamentul fata de proiectiile pe care le avem in legatura cu o anumita experienta ne fura bucuria de a trai si ne inchide inima, fiind tot timpul dezamagiti si niciodata multumiti. Adevarata bucurie se naste spontan atunci cand ramanem deschisi si flexibili in fata vietii.
2. ramanem* linistiti* si calmi*, chiar si atunci cand traversam momente dificile*, stiind* ca fiecare lucru are rostul lui si ca linistea din inima noastra va fi singura care va reaseza linistea si in afara noastra. Ingrijorarea creaza si mai multa ingrijorare. Agitatia produce si mai multa agitatie. Nemultumitului i se ia darul. Judecatii i se va raspunde cu aceeasi moneda. Pacea, in schimb, va produce pace. Rabdarea va fi rasplatita. Iubirea va vindeca inimi si va intoarce la ea si mai multa iubire.Iti propun ca moment de reflectie pentru astazi, sa privesti* la viata ta si sa vezi care sunt lucrurile, experientele, oamenii in legatura cu care inca ai atasamente care nu fac decat sa te raneasca. Priveste* cu sinceritate la aceste atasamente si propune-ti sa renunti* la ele. Sa fii recunoscator/oare pentru ceea ce a fost, este si va fi, dar fara a te angrena* in imagini sau dezamagiri cu privire la cum ar fi trebuit sa fie sau la cum consideri ca trebuie sa fie pe mai departe.
Bucura-te* de ceea ce a fost si pastreaza-ti* inima deschisa pentru ceea ce urmeaza sa vina. Nu pune* insa vietii conditii, ci permite-i* sa te surprinda. Ai incredere* ca atunci cand inima iti este usoara, tot ceea ce vine catre tine, vine sa-ti serveasca unui bine mai mare.
Elibereaza-ti* sufletul de dependente si atasamente.
Ia-ti libertatea inapoi si ofera-le tuturor libertatea inapoi.
Elibereaza* prezentul si viitorul, eliberand trecutul.
Recunostinta pentru ce a fost. Recunostinta pentru ce este.
Recunostinta pentru ce va fi.
Nu lasa mesajul de astazi sa fie doar un mesaj in plus, ci ofera-ti* un
pic de timp de reflectie si eliberare.
Inchide ochii. Respira* profund. Fa liniste* si ramai* acolo.
Impaca-te* cu toate si cu toti.
Trimite* iubirea ta tuturor.
Elibereaza-te* de tot ceea ce nu te mai serveste.Pentru pacea si bucuria inimii tale, e momentul sa faci asta acum.
am multe sa scriu si si mai multe de facut 😀 despre subiectele de mai sus… mai ales despre cum abordez eu acele lucruri. a fi recunoscator e simplu, imediat si la indemana oricum. despre restul, poate vine si acel moment cand voi scrie…
in esenta, vipassana si yoga asta fac… ma invata “cum sa…” cele de mai sus, la modul practic si aplicabil in viata de zi cu zi. am pus cate un asterisc (*) mai sus in text la cele pasaje despre care vorbesc. la ele ma refer cand spun… cum sa fac astea… in acest moment si in acelasi timp sa aiba efect in viata mea.
acum scriu despre cum ca as scrie… cam la faza asta sunt :)… adica sunt mai mult in interior, iar cuvintele le nasc… greu :).